Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Okay y'all. So, I will make this as short and sweet as is humanly possible for me. I know, that is a stretch, but so are the yoga pants that I have on...Lowe's has truly disappointed me. My mother-in-law moved out this past weekend and we decided to give Caroline back her old room which was builder's beige, then pink, then beige/blue, and is now pink again. We turned her old room...old as in the one that she has been in for the past 6 months, not the old one as in her original one...oh, for Pete's sake, now I am even confused....Where was I? Oh yeah, it is now an office. Soooo, I go to one of the stores that I am sure they have at the strip mall in Heaven, "Lowe's", to get some paint (this mall will also include Hobby Lobby, Anthropologie and Chipotle in case you were wondering). Well, I decided upon a lovely pale pink, because if you know my daugther, she loves pink. I decided upon "Chalk Pink 1" by Laura Ashley. I asked for 1 gal. of primer tinted to match the paint & 1 gal. of satin paint. They sent me home, unknowingly (to me, that is) with 1 gallon of OIL-BASED Kilz primer and 1 gallon of LATEX paint. I didn't realize this little faux pas until I had already cut in the top half of the ceiling and around the doors (I didn't do the bottom because I was going to use that wainscotting wallpaper on the bottom half, but that is another disaster that I will go into detail about in a later post.), and was trying to clean out my brush with water. Ummm, yeah, that is when I realized that something was awry. I called Lowe's, told them my situation and they ("they" as in lady that was working the paint desk) told me that it was "fine". Apparently, I had nothing to worry about because it was primer and you can put latex paint over oil-based primer. That is what people do when they want to change from oil to latex. At least, that is what she said. Let me go ahead and say that I didn't believe her, but she is paint desk girl, and I am not. It isn't in my wheelhouse. Well, let's just say that it wasn't "fine" as paint desk girl said. It took twice as much paint (which equates to twice the time and four times the frustration) to get it to look right. (I have to add the disclaimer that the Lowe's manager confirmed my suspicions and discounted our next 2 gallons 50%...thank you very much.)

Needless to say, it isn't perfect, but my quest for paint perfection ended after the 45th coat of paint...and the realization that my husband was cutting in with my pastry brush.

Friday, February 12, 2010

You just never know about Texas weather. Those of you who don't live in Texas truly don't understand how true this is. This is what our house looks like this morning. From the way that the snow hit my snow boots this morning, I am going to bet that we had nearly a foot of snow....in Texas...I am serious. We are supposed to have temperatures in the 50s tomorrow. Goodbye snow. It was nice to have you, if only for a couple of days...

Monday, February 1, 2010

When you are stuck at home with 2 sick kids for what feels like an eternity (really only 6 days), it is amazing how productive you become. After about 4 days, I finally had enough. The retina burning turquoise walls and way too shiny and uneven stained cabinets had to go.

Here is the laundry room before I ever touched it...

Lovely 1990's oak cabinets. I will say, they were in great shape, are very sturdy & I love the raised panels.

After ripping out the matching 1990's linoleum, do you remember me putting these totally rad (oops, sorry, I have the 90s on the brain) peel and stick laminate flooring tiles in?Now, for those of you new to my blog, these are the same tags that I made to hang on the laundry sorter. ...and the same jars to hold various stuff that I use daily.

Now, here is my new old laundry room!

I wish I had the pictures of the retina burning color on the walls that came after my before pictures above...totally confused? Welcome to my world...Anywho, I think I was too embarrassed to keep the pictures. Here is the newest color. I mixed 3 different colors I had in my garage and came up with this lovely little blue-gray. I like it. It doesn't hurt my eyes and that is always a bonus. I also painted 1 layer of Kilz and a couple of coats of regular latex paint over the polyshades that was there before. I was shocked at how well it covered and at how durable it seems to be, because Heaven knows that I am flat out sick of this darn room and it wasn't going to be painted again no matter how horrifying it turned out.